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Although we had received a few inches of snow during each day of our trip, Ski Day 5 was a bona-fide powder day with over 20 cm of new snow (8+ inches) overnight. Since it was a Saturday, AND a powder day, it meant that the locals would be out to gobble up the freshies. When we arrived at the bottom of the Silverlode lift (see bright area in picture), there were already over 100 eager powderhounds there ready to get first tracks (see image to the left). I guess we can't really blame them.
Dave lays down some fresh tracks off to the right of the Paradise lift. At this point on a powder day morning, it was VERY tough to get everyone to stop and set up for video.
On this day, another friend of ours, Ben, joined us from Seattle. Here's a shot from the same position as the previous picture. I quickly spun around and faced more uphill as Ben came flying by. E had heard all week about Ben and his speedy skiing, and on Saturday she finally got to witness his "no holds barred" style, hopefully you can get the idea from this picture.
Looking even further uphill, we find Scott coming down through the powder. I thought this shot was interesting due to the way the snow had exploded around him as he came up out of it
Despite the fact that we loved the trees, some of us just couldn't resist getting out onto the trail and hitting some open powder. Here we see J.Spin on the Paradise lift line as he approaches the camera for a close shot. Below, he passes the camera, then launches off the cross trail (trail #34, Boardwalk) and eventually drops out of sight in a puff of powder. It made for a great video sequence.
E sifts her way through the powder somewhere in the Paradise area. Even after we consulted the video sequence associated with this image, we still couldn't localize it further than that. Once you disappear into the trees at Red, sometimes you just keep going until you come to a boundary rope or lift. You certainly don't ever have to ski the same path twice.
Here we are looking down upon the lower slopes of Mt. Roberts just outside the ski area boundary. In the map I've shown, they do a good job of picturing Mt. Roberts (the mountain in the upper left corner of map with various slides of snow on it), but they weren't able to get everything exactly in the correct place. The Paradise lift (see red line in middle of map) actually starts right at the bottom of Mt. Roberts, but unfortunately, this map is a bit skewed in order to show the trails of the Paradise area. If you look in the map, the area that I've lightened is actually what you see in the picture. At the bottom of the powder field (middle top of picture) you can see a dark area in the snow. This is actually the base terminal for the Paradise lift (which heads out the upper left corner of the picture), and a line with skiers snaking off to the left. Unfortunately, the fog was especially thick here, so the image is clouded. The slope starts out at about 30-35 degrees and had about 2 feet of fairly light powder on it, much of it untracked. Those first few steep turns were certainly some of my favorites of the trip. Traversing out to this powder field was about as far as you could go before getting into the closed territory between Mt. Roberts, Red Mountain, and Granite Mountain. This area is a basin that is not served by lifts, and thus requires a hike out (pictured as the yellow striped area on the map). There were a number of tempting lines that dropped into this region (especially off the Granite area), but we avoided them since we didn't know the territory well and didn't want to deal with a slog out through deep snow. It was possible to hike higher on Mt. Roberts and ski the chutes (pictured on the map). Although we didn't hike up that way, we did encounter folks along the traverse that were heading up for earned turns. The terrain looked like a lot of fun.
Even after our run down the far slope of Mt. Roberts, we continued to ski some of the terrain just outside the boundary in the woods. Although the lines were short (generally in the range of 100 to 300 feet of vertical, with the vertical increasing the farther you traversed) they were basically unlimited, and unused. We couldn't turn down the chance to ski such great untracked lines through the trees, as Scott demonstrates in the above picture. The snow was certainly worth a few minutes of traversing.
Dave finds himself a great line in the same area, usually the only tracks we encountered were our own.
That's it for ski day number 5. Onward to our last day at Red Mountain.